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What does this Lifestream say about my digital activities? Certainly that I’m word-orientated, and that I read the Guardian: also, that my digital activities augment (or are augmented by? – the directionality is an unstable question) my paper-based activities.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AThe_Guardian_Building_Window_in_London.JPG By Bryantbob (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsBefore EDC, I’d have said I was a cautious and restrained user of digital resources. As part of the learning process, some of the brakes have come off.

After 112 email visitations from the pinbot@explore.pinterest.com, I’m gradually becoming acclimatised to daily encounters with Pinterest. But it’s the connections I’m drawing (e.g. some images of Roman ships on Pinterest thrown up by a Google search for cybernauts this week) and uses I can see (e.g. images for my final assignment, and other such future works) which are sparking my (p)interest.

Is Pinbot thus missing the mark with me? No, I’ve come to see complex networks within which I’m embedded and living. This has been especially so in EDC’s Algorithmic Cultures block. My eyes have been opened (and widened) to the everyday nature of algorithms, and their relative ubiquity, especially where I can’t immediately see them. That has both fed and loosened my caution and constraint as a digital user – and as one usedby digital cultures.

EDC has made me use some digital modalities I wouldn’t have touched before – Adobe Spark and Thinglink, especially, have surprised me as being ‘things I can do’, with the kinds of spin-offs into other uses I’ve mentioned with Pinterest. Other digital modalities are becoming more embedded – blogging, Tweeting and ‘hanging out’. These are likely to become digital norms for me, with resultant changes in my digital practices and identity. I’m also freely exploring previously unknown things, such as Jing, with an eye to how I can use it in my teaching. These feel like major steps-forward for me.

There are Community Cultures effects, too. Just as I hit a blank prior to starting this paragraph, I flicked over to Tweetdeck, and saw three people ‘liked’ my final Tweet. A little burst of encouragement, as I turn into this paragraph – strangely, the kind of encouragement I would have questioned and distanced myself from, prior to the course. But now, things are a little different, a little more entangled. I don’t anticipate becoming Big on Pinterest, or any other social media, but who knows? And, just yesterday, I saw this blog post on Tweetdeck, and immediately thought ‘there are a couple of apps I’ll try’, and clipped it into Evernote. Bread-and-butter steps for some, perhaps, but significant shifts for me, and my digital activities.

Have I become a cyborg? I don’t think so. More of that in my final assignment. But more entangled, for sure. But that’s life, more widely. It’s when you stop being entangled that you die, or start to die. That day will come, but ahead of then, it’s entangling forwards.

In my last week’s Lifestream, I’ve tried to look forward. I think it’s a complex, conflicted and confined future, humanly speaking, in the medium term. But I’m thankful for a saviour, and a professional and personal context in which to teach of him, and I’ll press on with that. Thank you, James and Jeremy, for EDC along that road.

I don’t know what the Guardian was doing, leaving this film until the last week of our course (I’ll post the film underneath here, below the Twitter exchanges). But then it was a fruity wrap-up on so much of the course, perhaps Jeremy and James arranged it as such. (Classic bit of algorithmic paranoia, just to reprise that theme, too.)

The fun of it is that we’re asking the same questions at the end of the course that we were faced with at the start of the course. Not in any sense a sign of failure, more a mark of magnitude. These are the Big Questions, which are going to issue in multiple, unfolding answers.

This Tweet concerns the intention of a MIT-based project called Solid to “to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy.”

‘Solid’ is an abbreviation of ‘socially-linked data’, and the project, overseen by Tim Berners-Lee, sees socially-linked data to arise from and for “a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles”. It’s key principles are ‘true data ownership’, ‘modular design’ and ‘reusing existing data’.

Earlier in my Lifestream, I reported and reflected upon Berners-Lee’s 2017 open letter calling for sustained freedom freedom and privacy on the web. Now, as the Lifestream moves towards the end of EDC, here lies a key issue for the future of the internet – to avoid becoming the splinternet.